…one week, two days, twelve hours, sixteen minutes, eight seconds…tick-toc-tick-toc…

I’m writing from the humble confines of a rather unusual location. I would love to feed you some shit about being in Fiji with the Bud girls or travelling the world with Kenny on the pro mini-golf tour but that’s just not the case. There’s no easy way to break news like this, so I’ll just come right out and say it, I’m in PRISON. I’m incarcerated. That’s right kids. The big house, the joint, the slammer. Actually, it’s not even a real prison. It’s a Minimum Security Detention Facility (a MSDF).

I’m a minimalist and therefore not up on the maximization of anything. I would venture to guess that it’s somewhat comparable to an overstated minimization in that it’s the maximum of a minimum situation.

I hesitate to use any of the usual flowery words to describe my new surroundings as they’re nothing at all like I expected them to be. Once again I have been conned by the drug-like power of television and therefore am at a loss to accurately depict this place. I can say that it’s a lot more relaxing than I thought it would be. I have access to tennis courts, a golf course, a gym, and a pottery room (all of which, of course, I have no intention of using). But there is an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a ping-pong room, and an arcade so I’m not totally screwed. To be quite honest, if I knew prison was going to be this fun I would have been arrested for something a long time ago.

Which brings me to my first real complaint about prison (or this particular facility anyway): I have absolutely no ambition, whatsoever, to escape. It would be altogether unromantic and devoid of any epic sense of struggle. It’d be far too easy to escape from this place and would be a completely empty personal victory. One sand wedge malfunction on the fifth, tenth, or thirteenth and I could be sitting in a McDonald’s in less than an hour. Which would be pointless, of course, because there’s already one in the cafeteria. That and a Pizza Hut. I can hear it all now.

Guard One: Where’s Matt?
Guard Two: I heard he hit a bad wedge shot on five, must be looking for his ball.
Guard One: He’s got no short game.
Guard Two: Yeah.

One week after my escape:

Guard Two: Seen Good a all?
Guard One: Nope.
Guard Two: Wow.
Guard One: There goes his handicap.

Before I went to prison I had no idea what a handicap was. I always thought it had something to do with personal characteristics.

Besides that there’s really nothing to worry about in this place. There’s none of the usual stresses that one commonly equates with being locked up, such as: “I hope to God I don’t drop the soap in the shower�� or “some big dude named Chico is going to make me his bitch.�

We’re allowed visits every Saturday and Wednesday and they provide the inmates with little private rooms in which to mess about with wives and girlfriends. It’s kind of like hanging out with the guys most of the time and going home for sex. In some respects it could be viewed by some men as a limited form of paradise. Those inmates that don’t have wives or girlfriends have been known to “hire� them from time to time. Most of the inmates in this place are white-collar criminals so their tastes run to the extreme and they can well afford them. The guards run a little service in this capacity that’s been nicknamed “the pink express.� This service utilizes professional gold-diggers who sleep with rich, incarcerated men in hopes of winning their favour and becoming their permanent fuck-puppets. This, of course, leads to gifts such as all-expenses paid trips to Mexico, private condos, jets, cars, and cash. It’s like a mail order bride service that supplies very attractive women that have no ambition beyond basking in the sun and shooting their mouths off about how rich their sugar daddies are. It’s a pissing contest of sorts.

You might find all of this rather crass but I would urge you to seriously explore the alternative. It’s a lot better than getting raped by a three-hundred-pound guy with a hair-sweater.

So I’m sitting here in my nifty blue jump suit typing this out on one of the prison computers (there are twenty in all). They’re decent machines too. The one I’m on right now is ten times faster than the one I had at home and has video conferencing. This means I can talk to someone face to face in Borneo, in real time, whenever I like. There are guys in here that use things to play the stock market, do overseas banking, and even run their companies. The video conferencing thingy allows them to actually attend board meetings from prison. The funny thing is that most of these guys are throwing cash around that they stole. This one guy, Morris Hawthorne, uses the computer to transfer cash from bank to bank in Europe because the government and the cops are still looking for it. He even has an accountant who e-mails him with secret codes and tells him if the money’s in jeopardy. I like Morris. He’s a crafty one, he is.

The average IQ in this place is well above the genius level. I seem to be the only person ruining that average. It’s like MIT behind bars. There’s even one freak who’s in here for hacking but he still does it every day using the prison computers. Just last week he turned off all the lights in Boise, Idaho for an hour. The guys threw a party for him to celebrate. There was champagne. Very expensive champagne. And this chick that jumped out of a huge cake. Her name was Wendy. She tasted like coconut cream.

The cells, if you can call them that, are pretty big and have track lighting. My bed is comfortable and the toilet’s relatively space-aged. It’s not altogether unlike a Comfort Inn room sans the phone, complimentary religious text, and curtains. They don’t even lock the cell doors at night. You can wander out into the common area any time you like. Sometimes I stay in the arcade well past lights out. Galaga looks wicked-cool in the dark, let me tell ya.

But as far as most of the inmates are concerned the cells are crude and completely unacceptable. These guys are used to five-star hotels. Not being able to order room service at 4 a.m. is rather annoying I guess. The guy in the cell next to me is known as Chip. Chip’s real name is Winston Myers III, though his good friends call him Willy (and God are they annoying: Well, Willy, Muffy got that new Mercedes but, ha-ha, the blasted thing just stopped running one day and she had to call a tow truck. So she had to get a ride to the club in the truck with some ungodly grease monkey. Marla says it took her a week to get the smell out of her clothes, ha-ha-ha). Somebody get over to the club with a flame thrower, would ya. There’s good work to be done there.

Willy’s prison name is Chip. The guys call him that because he’s one of those stuck-up old-school rich boys who considers everyone to be beneath him. Due to the fact that most of the millionaires in this place are nouveaux riches, they’re just not on Chip’s level. They call him Chip because he’s got a rather large one on his shoulder. He asked me the other day if I knew why they called him that. I told him that everyone thinks he has a smoking short game. He asked me how a short game could possibly smoke.

My other neighbour is a wacky old guy named Frederick Leiber. Freddy’s in the slammer because he happened to crash his Bentley into a fence while under the influence of alcohol and receiving an oral examination from a fifteen-year-old (who he swears said she was twenty-five). The first time he told me about it I laughed my ass off. I guess if you’re going to go to jail at the age of seventy-two it might as well be for something as young and stupid as that. Freddy blames the entire thing on his chauffeur.

I tell ya, being loaded must really rule. All you have to do all day is pretend to look busy and always make sure you’re banging someone you shouldn’t be. A little brandy, a cigar, and then it’s off to bed. Mission accomplished. I don’t know about you, but it beats drinking Columbia and messing around with some chick named Candy in the bushes while trying not to puke on your shoes.

I have two of the most pretentious neighbours in the world on either side of me. But they’re not so bad. Prison is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter how special you think you are in here because, after all, you’re IN HERE.

I’ve started writing a book. Since I’ve got nothing better to do with my time I figured I might as well get it over with. Up until now I had a very detailed plan concerning the creation of such a work. I vowed I’d wait until my thirty-fifth birthday (some seven years and a bit) and then I’d start. I also vowed that, no matter what, I’d only ever write one. If it’s shit then my plan is as good as gold. If not then I’ll simply disappear.

The book I’m writing is about robot bananas. They’re called Bananabots. These tiny little yellow robots were created by a South American scientist to replace human combat troops in the jungle. The theory behind them is that when the enemy is walking through the jungle the Bananabots simply drop from the trees and begin to peel. Once half-peeled they start to spin around really fast, using their peels to slice the enemy to bits below the knees. The scientist creates these things but discovers, too late, that he’s made them too intelligent. There’s a flaw in their programming. The little Bananabots go mental and kill the scientist and everyone in his little town. To make matters worse they also learn how to build new Bananabots. For five years the Bananabots stay in this little South American town multiplying until one day some American tourists show up and a group of elite Bananabots stow away in their luggage. They hide there until they are back in the States, where they pop out of the luggage and start killing everything in sight.

Eventually the Bananabots kill the majority of the people in North America and enslave the survivors. The entire continent is ruled by little banana robots that are blood thirsty killers. This eventually leads up to the 2004 Olympic Games where they win thirty-two gold medals, prompting the European powers to build a giant robot monkey to invade North America and eat all the Bananabots. They build the giant Monkeybot and send him over to eat the bananas and the world is saved. But little does anyone know that there are still thousands of Bananabots back in the little South American town where it all started. I’m not sure what’ll happen after that but I know it’ll be as brilliant as the first bit.

And to think I owe it all to being in prison. It’s like a creativity magnet. It just keeps pulling good ideas out of my head. I can’t help myself. Since I’ve been here I’ve been able to secure the funding I need to make WaterWorld II and have even been offered the head coaching position of a new NFL team (The Boise Barbarians). I’ve never played the game in my life and don’t really like football. But what the hell, it could be fun for a while. Anything to give that “Gipper� speech to a room of steroid junkies making ten million dollars a year. So I’ll coach the team for half the year and spend the rest of the time constructing an even more expensive floating city on which to shoot ten minutes of footage for Water World II. Then I’m going to blow the whole set up. It will be great to have a small army of people build a floating set for three years only to use it for five scenes and then blow the whole fucking thing sky high. You’ve gotta love explosions. Pop goes the weasel.

I’m currently working on a scheme to get myself transferred to a minimum-security mental facility as an experiment. My thesis statement:

Do affluent criminals in a regular minimum-security facility have it better or worse than slightly criminally insane affluent prisoners in a minimum -security mental institution?

Or.

How much difference is there between some rich old guy who crashes his one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar car and gets caught drinking and driving while getting blown by a Britney Spears lookalike compared to some old guy that dresses you in a clown suit and does the same thing?

At the very least I’ll get fifty different types of sedatives and some free art aggression therapy.

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